SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

One of the reasons why the Notes can be considered as an example of “media
archaeology” ante litteram, so to say, is that the idea of history that lies in the
background of this project conceives of history as the coexistence of different
archaeological “layers.” With Freud and Benjamin – who in the short text “Excavation
and Memory” (1932) had argued that memory can be considered as “the
medium [Medium] of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium
[Medium] in which ancient cities lie buried,” so that “he who seeks to approach
his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging” 55 – Eisenstein
shared an archaeological understanding of history and memory which constitutes an
important element in order to understand the “general history” he was trying to
establish. 56 The two diary entries we will comment on in the next paragraph,
with their insistence on the “layers” of history and consciousness, confirm this
idea.
2. Theory, History, Creation: “A Flash in Slow Motion through
Centuries of Evolution”
In the first diary entry, written on June 25, 1947, we read (all terms and phrases
initalicsfollowedby*arewritteninlanguagesotherthanRussian):
On Balzac descended the unitary conception of the Comédie Humaine
(according to Émile Ludwig). 57 On me descends instead the awareness that
Ihave,foralreadymanyyears,beenwritingahistorysuchas*itappearstome.
Almost all of my essays on cinema involve some historical excursus.
“Griffith” and the history of montage thought. “The history of close-up pars
pro toto*” is a section derived from it as if by germination. “Disney” and the
multitude of prelogical influences on him. “Stereo” and the history of scenic
actions.“Chronicle”andtheDionysiancommemorativeactions.Montageand
the Chinese culture of hieroglyphs. Landscape and the history of the Chinese
understanding of nature. Cinema in color and the history of coloristic
perceptions – the origin of the notion of complementary colors, etc. And I
have become a historian of the One Thousand and One Nights of the possibilities
of cinema. 58
In this diary entry, Eisenstein acknowledges how most of his theoretical writings
– from “Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves” (1942) to the various texts on the history
of close-up as a form of pars pro toto contained in the Memoirs and in Metod,
from the essay on Disney (1940) to the one on stereoscopic cinema (1947), from
the remarks on the musicality of Chinese landscape painting contained in Nonindifferent
Nature (1941-1945) to the essays on color, from the essays on Chinese
culture and“hieroglyphs”all thewayuptothegenealogical lineconnecting DionysiandithyrambstohistoricalcinemaandtelevisionwhichwefindintheNotes–
34 antonio somaini